Book Description
Large IT organizations increasingly face the challenge of integrating various web services, applications, and other technologies into a single network. The solution to finding a meaningful large-scale architecture that is capable of spanning a global enterprise appears to have been met in ESB, or Enterprise Service Bus. Rather than conform to the hub-and-spoke architecture of traditional enterprise application integration products, ESB provides a highly distributed approach to integration, with unique capabilities that allow individual departments or business units to build out their integration projects in incremental, digestible chunks, maintaining their own local control and autonomy, while still being able to connect together each integration project into a larger, more global integration fabric, or grid. Enterprise Service Bus offers a thorough introduction and overview for systems architects, system integrators, technical project leads, and CTO/CIO level managers who need to understand, assess, and evaluate this new approach. Written by Dave Chappell, one of the best known and authoritative voices in the field of enterprise middleware and standards-based integration, the book drills down into the technical details of the major components of ESB, showing how it can utilize an event-driven SOA to bring a variety of enterprise applications and services built on J2EE, .NET, C/C++, and other legacy environments into the reach of the everyday IT professional. With Enterprise Service Bus, readers become well versed in the problems faced by IT organizations today, gaining an understanding of how current technology deficiencies impact business issues. Through the study of real-world use cases and integration patterns drawn from several industries using ESB--including Telcos, financial services, retail, B2B exchanges, energy, manufacturing, and more--the book clearly and coherently outlines the benefits of moving toward this integration strategy. The book also compares ESB to other integration architectures, contrasting their inherent strengths and limitations. If you are charged with understanding, assessing, or implementing an integration architecture, Enterprise Service Bus will provide the straightforward information you need to draw your conclusions about this important disruptive technology.

From the Author
A note to book reviewer P. Pant, who wrote the negative comments about Java in your review that is posted below – I really appreciate that you point out that the book is "extremely well written". However, it appears that you have missed some key points in your reading of the book. An ESB is all about heterogeneity, therefore Java technology is a useful thing to be able to integrate with when using an ESB. JMS, for example, is a well established standard for messaging, with broad industry support. It is one of the MANY ways to integrate with other applications through an ESB. I don’t mention it any more or any less than other standard technologies like XPath or XSLT. In fact, I have an entire chapter on "Message Oriented Middleware" which generically discusses MOM concepts such as store-and-forward messaging. At the end of the chapter is a small section on JMS and another equal amount of ink devoted to WS-Reliability and WS-ReliableMessaging. The final chapter, BTW is about how ESB’s and the Web Services stack of specifications (many of which I am co-author of) are going to evolve together. Lastly, I appreciate that you have correctly recognized that "the concepts outlined nicely complement Hohpe's book on intergation patterns in my view". I worked with Gregor Hohpe during the writing of this book to ensure that the readers of both books would have a consistent visual metaphor when describing integration patterns. Dave

FROM THE PUBLISHER